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Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/magic-circle/
19•tobr•3d ago

Comments

Dylan16807•1h ago
This assumes very slow AI progress. I'm not one to hype up LLMs, but I would never claim it'll take 200 years before an AI can untangle a sewing machine with robot hands. Stuffing an envelope and applying a stamp? My bet is less than 20 years. That's a level of tactility that can do a tremendous amount of real-world activity. And the capability of a high end robot controlled by a human keeps expanding, so in the hypothetical "AGI" scenario the flood fill gets pretty big.
dandellion•28m ago
Self-driving looks like a much easier problem, it has gotten a massive amount of investment in the last decade, and it's not fully solved yet. Compared to that your 20 years estimate sounds way too optimistic.
Dylan16807•19m ago
I don't think driving looks easier than untangling. You can untangle nice and slow with little outside involvement. When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem.
Wowfunhappy•46m ago
Overall, I love this essay. However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through:

> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.

Is this correct? I don't know. If it's wrong... well, then there's a missing pixel in the magic circle, and flood fill will make the whole thing recognizable.

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scrapin...
350•ninjagoo•5h ago•205 comments

uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts

https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts/
491•i5heu•7h ago•169 comments

My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker

https://aimilios.bearblog.dev/reverse-engineering-sleep-mask/
317•minimalthinker•9h ago•158 comments

Zvec: A lightweight, fast, in-process vector database

https://github.com/alibaba/zvec
47•dvrp•1d ago•9 comments

Ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you

https://ooh.directory/
413•hisamafahri•10h ago•117 comments

IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/tech-giant-ibm-tripling-gen-z-entry-level-hiring-according-to-chro...
176•WhatsTheBigIdea•1d ago•75 comments

Instagram's URL Blackhole

https://medium.com/@shredlife/instagrams-url-blackhole-c1733e081664
52•tkp-415•1d ago•9 comments

5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/latest/2026/02/ancientegyptiandrillbit/
42•geox•3d ago•1 comments

Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

https://www.robinsloan.com/winter-garden/magic-circle/
19•tobr•3d ago•5 comments

Amsterdam Compiler Kit

https://github.com/davidgiven/ack
91•andsoitis•7h ago•21 comments

Can my SPARC server host a website?

https://rup12.net/posts/can-my-sparc-server-host-my-website/
6•e145bc455f1•4d ago•5 comments

Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone

https://github.com/alichherawalla/off-grid-mobile
8•ali_chherawalla•1h ago•0 comments

Discord: A case study in performance optimization

https://newsletter.fullstack.zip/p/discord-a-case-study-in-performance
42•tylerdane•23h ago•21 comments

Show HN: MOL – A programming language where pipelines trace themselves

https://github.com/crux-ecosystem/mol-lang
12•MouneshK•3d ago•3 comments

The consequences of task switching in supervisory programming

https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-02-13.html
29•bigwheels•1d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?

145•StefanBatory•6d ago•61 comments

Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB

https://github.com/datavorous/sameshi
183•datavorous_•10h ago•51 comments

Launching Interop 2026

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/launching-interop-2026/
39•linolevan•1d ago•2 comments

Colored Petri Nets, LLMs, and distributed applications

https://blog.sao.dev/cpns-llms-distributed-apps/
19•stuartaxelowen•3h ago•2 comments

Descent, ported to the web

https://mrdoob.github.io/three-descent/
135•memalign•5h ago•26 comments

A review of M Disc archival capability with long term testing results (2016)

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-review.html
58•1970-01-01•8h ago•59 comments

Unicorn Jelly

https://unicornjelly.com/
27•avaer•11h ago•8 comments

An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
628•scottshambaugh•1d ago•532 comments

A header-only C vector database library

https://github.com/abdimoallim/vdb
55•abdimoalim•6h ago•16 comments

Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook

https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkbook/
64•markus_zhang•4d ago•25 comments

Vim 9.2

https://www.vim.org/vim-9.2-released.php
323•tapanjk•8h ago•138 comments

YouTube as Storage

https://github.com/PulseBeat02/yt-media-storage
156•saswatms•15h ago•124 comments

How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have? (2020)

https://blog.yossarian.net/2020/11/30/How-many-registers-does-an-x86-64-cpu-have
80•tosh•11h ago•51 comments

A method and calculator for building foamcore drawer organisers

https://capnfabs.net/posts/foamcore-would-be-a-sick-name-for-a-music-genre/
58•evakhoury•5d ago•14 comments

Fun with Algebraic Effects – From Toy Examples to Hardcaml Simulations

https://blog.janestreet.com/fun-with-algebraic-effects-hardcaml/
50•weinzierl•4d ago•1 comments